The Siren by KATHERINE JOHN (general ebook reader .txt) 📕

2006: Twenty-seven-year-old Rivers marries Cole Power after meeting on the set of Faster.

2007: Rivers and Power divorce; she attacks a photographer outside a women’s clinic in Los Angeles.

2008: Rivers pays the photographer $200K; releases the universally panned movie Meg Grown Up and goes to rehab amid rumors she was drunk on set.

2009: Rivers’s midnight tantrum throwing pickle jars at a fan in a grocery store goes viral; she goes back to rehab.

2010: Rivers gets in a fistfight with the ex-wife of her trainer boyfriend that results in another lawsuit, which she settles for an undisclosed amount.

2011: Rivers gets a DUI and spends thirty days in jail, followed by another stint in rehab.

2013: Rivers stars in the reality television show Stella’s River of Wellness, in which she opens a wellness center (that quickly goes belly-up, leaving her near bankrupt).

2018: Rivers resurfaces in a cult-favorite low-budget horror flick and a Lifetime movie.

2019: Rivers cast opposite her ex-husband, Cole Power, in The Siren, set to shoot over the summer on the island of Saint Genesius in the Caribbean.

So where in the world was Stella between 2013 and 2018?

Sources close to the star tell us she’s been busy working for charity, building homes around the world for those in need. She apparently didn’t want the press to know because she simply wanted to give back without fanfare. Now, that is truly heartwarming. We found this picture of her in Guatemala, and she looks right at home in a hard hat with a hammer in her hand [pic].

Taylor

Monday, June 17

The sun had only just risen on the first day of filming, and we were already running behind. Stella’s fault; she hadn’t shown up until I’d sent a PA to drag her ass out of bed and escort her to set. Felicity apologized profusely for the both of them, saying they’d thought someone was going to pick them up—an offer Stella had turned down the previous evening in favor of walking the half mile to the soundstage for her morning exercise. (I say soundstage, but really it was nothing more than a converted warehouse on the far side of the golf course.) Covering my annoyance, I waved it off as a misunderstanding and assured them a production golf cart would be waiting at the end of the pier every morning from here on out, which seemed to placate Stella.

I didn’t want to let the bumpy start ruin my day, but it pissed me off. We’d rescued the bitch from obscurity with a job I knew she needed, and one day in she was already acting like a diva, like she deserved to traipse in whenever she wanted while the entire production waited around for her. Though in the back of my mind I did wonder if Felicity was really the one to blame for their tardiness. In the brief interaction I’d had with the two of them together thus far, it struck me that Stella relied mighty heavily on this pretty young assistant she’d snuck onto the film budget last-minute. According to what Cole pulled out of them on the beach yesterday, they’d known each other only two months. How much could you really know about someone after two months?

I took a deep breath in through my nose and let it out through my mouth like my therapist taught me. Everything was fine. This was all part of production: anything that could go wrong would. Stella was in the makeup chair now, and the sun wouldn’t set until six thirty, so we’d have enough daylight left to wrap the outdoor scene we had to shoot in the afternoon. We were so close to the equator that even in summer the days and nights were nearly even, which meant if we had anything to shoot outside, we had to run on time and pray the weather behaved. So far at least, the weather was behaving as predicted today.

“Nice cargo pants, half-pint.”

I spun to see Cole, smirking as he eyed my camouflage cargo pants. “They’re useful,” I returned, patting the pockets. “Lots of places to put stuff.”

“You should pick up a few things in the gift store.” He gave me a friendly pat on the back. “Take whatever you want. Just tell them it’s on me.”

What the hell? Before I could think of a response, he was gone. I was insulted, but also begrudgingly grateful for the opportunity to buy a few things more suitable for the tropics without spending an arm and a leg. Though damned if I’d replace my beloved cargo pants.

I patted the sweat trickling down my brow with a napkin and smeared another bagel with cream cheese, not bothering to toast it first. I’d been up since 4:30 a.m., and I was starving. I knew that I was stress eating and I really should step away from the craft service table before my ass no longer fit in these cargo pants, but I gave myself a break. First day of shooting always tied my stomach in knots.

Normally the scenes in a film would be shot completely out of order, dependent on the availability of locations and actors, but the very few locations and actors we had on The Siren allowed us to shoot largely in chronological order, a gift for which all of us were grateful. So we were starting today with the scene in which Stella’s character Marguerite and Cole’s character Peyton first meet, on a photo shoot where he’s the photographer and she’s the model.

It was a set within a set, so the lighting was complicated and already taking more time than we’d allotted, which only added to my anxiety. Six weeks was such a short amount of time to shoot ninety pages; we’d need to shoot fifteen pages a week, or three pages a day. It might not sound like much, but when you added up the lighting setup for every camera angle of every scene—and judging by his storyboards, Jackson wasn’t a director that skimped on angles—every minute was